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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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I'm not sure whether this counts as culture-war material, but it definitely is political, and I found it extremely interesting.

Daily Telegraph (found via Breitbart):

Revealed: Chagos deal to cost 10 times what Starmer claimed

Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal will cost 10 times more than he claimed, official figures reveal.

The Government’s own estimate of the cost of giving away the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius is almost £35bn, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act – far higher than the £3.4bn figure Sir Keir has previously used in public.

Labour ministers now face claims that they misled Parliament and the press with an “accountancy trick” to hide the size of the bill from taxpayers.

An official document produced by the Government Actuary’s Department shows the cost of the deal was first estimated at 10 times Sir Keir’s figure, at £34.7bn, in nominal terms.

The UK will pay £165m a year to rent Diego Garcia for the first three years.

The rent payments will then be set at £120m a year, increasing in line with inflation from year 14.

The document shows that civil servants were first instructed to lower the cost of the deal on paper to £10bn, to account for an estimated annual inflation rate of 2.3 per cent over 99 years.

Then it was reduced again by between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent per year using the Treasury’s Social Time Preference Rate, a principle that money spent immediately has more value than funds earmarked for future spending.

The final figure was calculated to be 90 per cent lower than the cash value of the payments the UK will make to Mauritius over the next century, in what critics say was a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.

Writing for The Telegraph, Dame Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said: “Instead of owning up to the costs, Labour have used an accountancy trick to claim the amount was only a mere £3.4bn.”

Foreign Office sources insisted ministers had used a “standard” calculation for long-term government spending, and denied accusations that it was part of a “cover-up”.

However, other projects announced by Labour have not used the same method, which has allowed ministers to advertise higher spending on popular policies. Angela Rayner has since launched a 10-year affordable homes plan that included inflation-level increases in government spending as part of the cost of the policy – a method not used with the Chagos deal.

I'm getting flashbacks to my Engineering Accounting class in college. Calculations in this vein definitely are used on a regular basis for cost–benefit calculations in engineering. And a long-term discount rate of 5–6 percent certainly sounds reasonable to me. But, if discount rates are being used selectively rather than uniformly, that indeed would count as an "accountancy trick".

Can someone explain to me the chain of events that led to the UK paying to get rid of the chagos islands like it’s a tree trunk or something? I understand Starmer wants to be rid of them for reasons that are stupid but why is he paying to do so.

We’ve got a base there, so we’re renting the islands back again from their ‘rightful owners’. Nothing will actually change, Mauritius will just have lots of our tax money now.

They're clearly using whichever method is most politically expedient in the circumstances. They deserve the criticism, but I can't see the impact of all this. Labor is likely out at the next election anyway over immigration and other systemic failures.

As I've bemoaned on multiple occasions, nobody is making the UK do this. The ICJ doesn't count, I've seen arthritic dogs ready to be ol' Yeller'd with a better bite:bark ratio. You can - if you are a sovereign state larger than Sealand - just ignore them. Mauritius? Why are they going to do, cancel Jet2 holidays and paddle over in their canoe?

Has anyone considered pitting one sacred cow against the other? Someone needs to tell Starmer that he could fund the NHS and pensions for another 3 weeks with the money.

Starmer is fully lawyer-brained. he is not mentally capable of ignoring a court.

The treaty establishing the jurisdiction of the court in question specifically excluded the U.K.s relationships with its former possessions. A lawyer-brained person would have no problem ignoring the court under such circumstances.

I think there's a difference in meaning going on here.

Parent commenter seems to mean "lawyer brained" as "treats the law as a totem or religion, sacred and inviolable, the font from which all good springs" whereas you seem to be meaning the type of person who will comb through reams of fine print to find the one technicality that lets them do what they wanted to all along.

Basically, subservience to law versus wielding the law as a weapon.

Starmer did a lot of work in, and seems to respect a great deal, international law in particular. The thing about international law is that it often has virtually no enforcement mechanism. The kind of lawyer who looks for technicalities to let their client get off scot-free does not go into international law, since their clients are already usually getting off scot-free if you do nothing at all. You need to have some moral belief in the righteousness of international law and need to use the weapons of activism as well to get anything done.

So the technically correct terminus for Starmer is international-law-brained.

Parent commenter seems to mean "lawyer brained" as "treats the law as a totem or religion, sacred and inviolable, the font from which all good springs"

So, bad lawyer-brained?

I mean the sort of brain you'd expect a lawyer to have, which is definitely closer to the second. They're advocates, after all.

This issue is the focus of the sole dissent from the ICJ's opinion (authored by Judge Donoghue of the US).

Today the Court recites once again that there would be “compelling reasons” to decline to give an advisory opinion when such a reply “would have the effect of circumventing the principle that a State is not obliged to allow its disputes to be submitted to judicial settlement without its consent”. However, the decision to render today’s Advisory Opinion demonstrates that this incantation is hollow. It is difficult to imagine any dispute that is more quintessentially bilateral than a dispute over territorial sovereignty. The absence of United Kingdom consent to adjudication of that bilateral dispute has been steadfast and deliberate. Mauritius was thwarted by this absence of consent, so took another route, pursuing the present request and thereby fulfilling the affirmation of its Foreign Minister in 2004 that the State would use “all avenues open to us in order to exercise our full sovereign rights over the Chagos Archipelago”. The delivery of this Advisory Opinion is a circumvention of the absence of consent.

Donoghue is complaining about the Court's actions, but even had the opinion been unanimous, the point would stand; the court does not have jurisdiction and so its opinion (even if perfectly well-reasoned according to its own rules) is not binding. It's even right there in the name, "Advisory Opinion". Any actually "lawyer-brained" person know this and not feel bound by the opinion. Therefore lawyer-brainedness is not an explanation for Starmer's actions.

Pretty sure the dude arguing Mauritius' side of the case was a mate of his, as well.

I genuinely don’t understand what’s going on in Starmer’s head.

Now, I’ve seen in a lot of lawyers this idea that respect for the Rule of Law is the one thing standing between us and full banana-republic-dom. you’re allowed to twist it into a pretzel but the moment you say, “the judge has made his decree, let him enforce it” you might as well be living in Trump’s America or Putin’s Russia. (And no, they don’t see a difference between the two).

I wonder if Starmer just sees himself as the last line of defense against the barbarians. If so it’s weird he gave the vote to 16 year olds.

At the end of the day 'The Law' is just a big pantomime that people believe in, like fiat currency. The theatre is enhanced with strange robes, wigs and funny words.

At the Nation State level, it is something to be used or discarded depending on how expedient it is. As part of the UN Security Council with veto powers, they can pretty much tell anyone to go pound sand over territoriality issues (assuming sanctions aren't in the wind).

This whole thing is a problem of their own making and seems to be a 'decolonisation' vanity project funded by the taxpayers.

At the end of the day 'The Law' is just a big pantomime that people believe in, like fiat currency.

But it's an important pantomime that they're willing to go to huge lengths to protect. A couple of Terry Pratchett quotes on justice and finance:

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

and

“But, in truth, it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever - provided, naturally, that you don't go and look. This is known as finance.”

Our current rulers are aware that everything is built on a foundation of dreams. It's just that they think this is necessary to uphold modern civilisation. That's why they're so invested in making sure everyone keeps up the pretence - they really do think it's best for everyone. Which is not necessarily to say they're right about that.

It's just that they think this is necessary to uphold modern civilisation.

I've seen no indication that this is the case. They're happy to violate the law when it suits them. If they're not violating this one, it's because they don't want to, not because they're held back by beliefs about what upholds modern civilization.

Scott talked about beliefs as tribal membership signals. If belief in the rule of law were easy, it would have no value as a signal.

(Why force the beliefs to pay double duty as underpinnings of civilisation and tribal membership signals? Well, if they are also the latter, it actually adds an incentive to profess them even when personally inconvenient.)

Modernity for them often means "the consensus of the last couple of decades". Which is how you often get claims that some relatively new understanding or institution is all that stands between people and barbarism. The laws they ignore presumably are from less civilized times.

Makes sense in that light.

Of course, being aware of being in a dream is itself lucid dreaming. Which is fine, but when you start then trying to use that awareness to deliberately twist the dream in your preferred direction, it reaches the metaphor's awkward transition of dreaming being an individual person's thing to, well, something other people have a stake in.

Socially controversial social engineering that tries to leverage lucid-dreaming-like 'I know this is a dream, but others must still behave like a dream while I change their dream around them*' has some of the same experiences/connotations/implications of being stuck in a dream you don't control, but when then keeps changing for the worse. I.E., a nightmare of feeling impotent and trapped.

I agree completely, especially with

a nightmare of feeling impotent and trapped

This was a big part of Yes, Minister's critique - the Civil Service and 'British Democracy' might be all that stands between us and barbarism, but isn't it convenient that this lines up so neatly with what they wanted to do anyway?

I'm reading the Wikipedia on the Chagos Islands right now, and I'm a little confused as to why Mauritius wants the islands.

Does anyone here have any insight on that, or links on the history of these events where I could learn about it?

Ok, the weirdest part of the Wikipedia on the British Indian Ocean Territory is that its motto references Lemuria, an extremely outdated scientific theory that has connections to Theosophy.

But my understanding is that the most relevant element of the territorial dispute for people outside of Mauritius is that the territory nominally controls the .io country-code TLD. Geopolitical instability over British soverignty led to the mass exodus from .io domains.

The deal signed between the UK and Mauritius means that Mauritius will take control of the TLD; there was some doubt that it would continue to exist as a valid domain. We're definitely in a bizarre world where internet domain names are the subject of geopolitical disputes. But .su will bury us all.

Apparently the US also has military infrastructure on the islands, and Trump was a fan of the deal?

an extremely outdated scientific theory that has connections to Theosophy.

‘Scientific’.

Was lemuria ever a science hypothesis? I was under the impression that even back in the day it was ancient aliens tier.

Apparently the US also has military infrastructure on the islands, and Trump was a fan of the deal?

I highly doubt Mauritius is dumb enough to tell the US to take their base away.

Was [L]emuria ever a science hypothesis?

Originally, it was attempting to provide a mechanism for how lemur fossils were found in India and Madagascar. (For today's lucky 10,000, lemurs are a tree-dwelling mammal related to monkeys and apes.)

Apparently the US also has military infrastructure on the islands, and Trump was a fan of the deal?

Trump probably figures the US can bully Mauritus much easier than it can bully the U.K. After all, there's little chance that Trump will be swayed by the scolding of some international court.

If he thinks that (and I’m not sure he does, America has been very anti the sale) then he’s an idiot. The UK is reflexively pro-America.

I realise this doesn’t sound correct to you, because the UK criticises America (especially Trump and MAGA) so much, but it’s still true. The UK sees its criticism as coming from a colleague in the same tent, and will never side with China or Russia or really any other power on a matter of serious geopolitics. All we ask for in return is some subsidies and some head pats but we will make do even without.

There are maniac Leftists of course, even in the government, but they hold no influence on these matters and they will certainly not support Russia/China over America.

I doubt the same is true of the Mauritius.

I doubt the same is true of the Mauritius.

I mean, if push comes to shove something like "y'know all those planes full of bombs we have sitting on the island we're leasing from you? the neat thing about bombs is that you can drop them absolutely anywhere!" seems like it would be a lot more effective on the Mauritanians than the Brits?

"Mauritanians could be here" he thought, "I've never been on this island before. There could be Mauritanians anywhere." Made in the USA reverberated his entire airbase, making it pulsate even as the $9 Billion subsidy circulated through his powerful thick military budget and washed away his (merited) fear of soviet aligned countries. "With bombs you can drop them anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.

I see you are a man of culture as well

this is, for me, hands-down meme of the year.

I realise this doesn’t sound correct to you, because the UK criticises America (especially Trump and MAGA) so much, but it’s still true. The UK sees its criticism as coming from a colleague in the same tent, and will never side with China or Russia or really any other power on a matter of serious geopolitics. All we ask for in return is some subsidies and some head pats but we will make do even without.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if europhiles in the UK would rather be part of Macron's vision of "Strategic autonomy" than America's junior partner when it comes to foreign policy(perhaps to the extent of preferring neutrality in the case of a Taiwan-based active conflict). Whether something like this ever happens is impossible to say but I don't think it's at all impossible, particularly if elite anti-America messaging continues at the same level of intensity.

There are maniac Leftists of course, even in the government, but they hold no influence on these matters and they will certainly not support Russia/China over America.

The forthcoming UK recognition of Palestine is I think an example that leftist anti-western opinion definitely has a role in UK policy-making.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if europhiles in the UK would rather be part of Macron's vision of "Strategic autonomy" than America's junior partner when it comes to foreign policy

Not a chance. Joining AUKUS was a giant middle finger to the French (who had been supplying the original contract) and a very visible symbol of allegiance to America over European integration. This is why DeGaulle tried to keep us out of the EU, he figured Anglo instincts would come to the fore.

preferring neutrality in the case of a Taiwan-based active conflict)

Neutrality maybe. But definitely not taking the Chinese side. More like our position re: Ukraine.

The forthcoming UK recognition of Palestine is I think an example that leftist anti-western opinion definitely has a role in UK policy-making.

I was going to have a sentence excluding that specifically but I mean global power politics between the big players. Being pro-Palestine is different, it’s going against US desires but it’s not siding with Russia or China except incidentally.

The U.K. is indeed pro-American, but if Trump figures he can just act as if the U.S. owns the place and Mauritus can suck it, that's even better, at least from Trump's perspective.

Maybe, though I think that's a mistake on his part. In any case it sounds like I misread you:

I realise this doesn’t sound correct to you

so apologies for that.

What stands out to me on Wikipedia is the insistence that the islands have an indigenous population that the British lied about and deported. The Chagos Archipelago article includes the introduction "the UK falsely claimed that the Chagos had no permanent population", and the page on the islanders themselves has as its second sentence "Under international law, they are the indigenous people of the Chagos archipelago".

Read on, however, and it becomes clear that this 'indigenous population' is a melange of people from many different regions brought to the islands by Europeans as workers in the 19th century, and that when the British deported them in the 60s and 70s, they moved around a thousand people, who were mostly workers on failing, unprofitable plantations that would have been closed in the near term anyway. This is probably not what most people have in mind when they think of colonial genocides of indigenous peoples. The Chagossians are a relatively recent polyglot of diverse origins, not people with an ancient connection to the islands, and seem likely to have had found more opportunities away from the islands anyway. I'm not asserting that the deportation was therefore morally unproblematic - I'm just saying that it doesn't seem like a very central case of the violations it's being presented as. Wikipedia doesn't technically lie - "the UK falsely claimed" and "under international law they are X" seem like claims that are at least arguably true - but it presents those claims in ways that strike me as calculated to produce a misleading impression.

I was under the impression that the indigenous people were one of the problems with the current deal--they aren't from Mauritus and if you're going to return the islands to anyone, you return it to them, not to Mauritus, which the deal specifically didn't do. (And if you check a map, the islands are nowhere near Mauritus either.)

It's true that they aren't ancient, but they were expelled against their will, so they should still have some right to the islands.

Indigenous just means ‘the last non-white people in a region’.

How poor would you need to be to enjoy money and opportunity at little cost?

Strategic Indo-Pacific military base home values are looking up. Mauritius has a GDP of ~15 billion USD. Put one and one together and the question becomes why wouldn't they want the islands? I wonder if the Chagos Islands might now be the single most lucrative asset for Mauritius. On top of the strategic value, Chagos adds a yuge additional Exclusive Economic Zone away from home. Surfers eagerly await imperialist eviction.

Can even get a nice bidding war going between the UK/US and China. Basically free money.

The ICJ has a conveniently abbreviated press release that can be found on this page. tl;dr: The UK granted independence to Mauritius in 1968 only after purchasing from Mauritius indefinite ownership of the Chagos Islands and evicting those islands' inhabitants. This was not a proper execution of the UK's duty to decolonize Mauritius. The UK must give the islands back to Mauritius. (Resettlement of the former inhabitants is a separate issue.)

That's true but Mauritius and the Chagos Islands are 1200 km from eachother, they were only in the same French administrative zone together because they're small islands in the Indian Ocean and the British kept the French organization. It makes little sense for Mauritius to have the islands when they never historically controlled them (the Maldives is at least closer and they fished around there) and there's no significant proximity.

That may be your opinion, but the ICJ decided otherwise by a vote of 13 to 1.

In its resolution 2066 (XX) of 16 December 1965, adopted a few weeks after the detachment of the Chagos Archipelago, the General Assembly deemed it appropriate to recall the obligation of the United Kingdom, as the administering Power, to respect the territorial integrity of Mauritius. The Court considers that the obligations arising under international law and reflected in the resolutions adopted by the General Assembly during the process of decolonization of Mauritius require the United Kingdom, as the administering Power, to respect the territorial integrity of that country, including the Chagos Archipelago.

The Court concludes that, as a result of the Chagos Archipelago’s unlawful detachment and its incorporation into a new colony, known as the BIOT, the process of decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed when Mauritius acceded to independence in 1968.

I'm well aware what the ICJ said but courts say silly things all the time. Courts are for legalities, they're very much into this abstract 'who was in what administrative zone when, regardless of whatever else was happening' remit.

Nations and sovereignty are about more than that. This case is perfect proof in point. The US military base there isn't going anywhere and that's the key part of this equation, indeed the only people on the island are those on the base. The British are just paying lots of money to make this legal issue go away so that they wouldn't have the bad PR of ignoring this court (which they are entitled to do as a permanent security council member). America couldn't care less about some international court, they don't recognize its authority at all if they rule against the US, nor does Russia or Israel for that matter.

It's not real law if people can and do ignore it when they feel like it, it's just talk. The ICJ isn't a real court, their opinions don't have much inherent weight and certainly don't in this case, it's only a matter of PR.

one wonders if they are using the same social time preference rate when calculating the costs of global warming in the future vs the costs of preventing global warming in the present. my understanding is the Stern Report used a discount rate of around ~1.5%. So that seems kind of suspicious that they are using a discount rate of between 2.5 and 3.5% here. however, the difference in rates is not super large. I think if they used a Stern rate it would increase the present value of the payments by a factor of 1.4 (where 1.0 would be the same value) compared to the rate they used.

also, whether it was misleading or not I think depends on how it was worded. If they said something like "the cost of the deal is 3.4 billion with payments over 100 years" then I think that is misleading because it gives the reader the impression that the payments are going to be something like 100 payments of 3.4 billion / 100 and a reader might think the net present value will be much lower. If you did not want to mislead the reader you would use more explicit wording like: "the net present value of the payments is 3.4 billion and will be paid over 100 years". My guess is the wording will just be standard wordcel games where you try to put false impressions in the heads of other people and then later claim the reader is at fault. I guess its also completely possible that all of the detail was shared with parliament but no-one in parliament actually reads the detail.

i've read the telegraph article and part of the article is written by the shadow foreign secretary priti patel. it seems like everyone knew what the cash value of the payments were all along but did not know how the treasury were calculating the final cost. i think in this case its hard to claim that treasury were that misleading. treasury should have explained originally how they came to their present value calculations but it's not like the value of the cash payments was hidden.

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